Nostrum Energy develops advanced dilute combustion systems and fuel injection technologies for aftermarket, research and OEM applications. The newest product it will be presenting at this year’s Engine Expo North America is a full water injection system for on-road, off-road, stationary and research engine applications. Nostrum’s water injection systems provide knock mitigation, octane on demand or NOx management for performance, efficiency or commercial engine applications.
The benefits of using water to control end-of-compression temperatures and thereby knock onset are that water is cheap, easily available, has a very high enthalpy of vaporization and has no negative impact on vehicle emissions. Nostrum’s patented colliding jet injectors rely on jet-to-jet collision as opposed to a traditional air shear break-up mechanism. This method improves atomization and significantly reduces liquid lengths, thus avoiding intake port impingement as well as minimizing water consumption. Nostrum will present the CFD design, optimization and test results for an application-specific (Nissan R35 GT-R), spray-targeted water injection system.
Nostrum has developed a new fully featured, Tier 1 level water injection controller. It has been designed to integrate into a wide range of engine configurations and applications. The water injection firing events can be tied to fuel injector firing events or they can be controlled by more conventional crank angle-based injection control strategies, thus allowing water injection to be adapted to virtually any engine application. Prototype controllers are currently being used on Nostrum’s Nissan R35 GT-R water injection system but are available for any kind of application.
The company uses water injection to create its own combustion cycles for better efficiency. The embedded control algorithms in the water injection controller provide a flexible and comprehensive control unit for engine and vehicle integration. Nostrum will also present at the conference on the system integration, calibration and performance of Nostrum’s water injection controller and spray targeted water injectors in a high-performance application like the Nissan GT-R, and how the system can provide knock mitigation and octane increases on demand. Data for field testing, mileage accumulation, altitude testing and vehicle performance will be presented, along with system capabilities and engine durability observations.